So here's my attempt at a new year's resolution. I am doing my best to resurrect my blog. With appropriate recognition of reality, my real resolution is to be, well, realistic with my goals. For example, not saying I'm going to post in my blog every day. Because who am I kidding? But I could perhaps post in my blog, say, once a week. Because life goes by fast and it often leaves little real record of itself if we don't take the time to leave the record.
What's the purpose of the blog? same as always. Blah, blah, blah. The thoughts going through my head. The edited reality of my life. The ups and downs of having my hand in too many things at once. regular life. Something like that.
So here's to a new year. Heading out to a party with my bacon-wrapped pigs in blankets. Thinking maybe I should have some lofty resolutions. Like avoiding the wal-mart, for example, where the bacon and pigs were purchased just today (it's not January 1 yet!). Or attempting to only set foot in a grocery 3 times a week instead of 8. Or thinking I'm finally going to start running. Nope. My resolutions are pretty simple. Try to mess up my kids a little less this year than I did in the one before. Try to eat just a little better than I have been. Get back to ordering that quarter of a cow. stop buying meat at Wal-Mart. Try to move toward making my own laundry detergent. Little stuff like that. The big stuff? Probably not gonna happen. But one step at a time, one step at a time. Right?
Monday, December 31, 2012
Monday, April 30, 2012
Moral Authority?
I've had it on my brain to get back to my blog (which I keep spelling "glob" because my hands are moving faster than my mind), and now I remember why I don't each time I think about doing it. The main reason is that I am technologically impaired. I think I have reached my lifetime quota of learning new systems, packages, and devices. When a sign-in page asks me a question I cannot answer, I am at an utter standstill. I cannot problem solve. When a Google-owned platform tells me that I cannot associate my account with a Gmail address, I'm stumped. Truly stumped.
I also don't like to be in a box. I was investigating BlogHer because, well, it's kind of a brand name, and I was confused and it raised my hackles a little. I'm not sure that I can say for sure I am "engaging community," and I even cringe a little at the thought of that. What if I go on, say, an unengaging binge? What if I find myself totally engaging, but the rest of the world finds me not so much so? Or the powers that be that accept my application to be part of the community don't find me communal enough. What if my material does not primarily appeal to women? I am not quite a rule-follower, and I get twitchy when things get sort of institutionalized. I would freak out if I felt I had to concoct contests or have giveaways of any kind. I don't really want to develop a brand or style identity. I like being inconsistent. I'm not a snappy subtitle with too many periods and no capital letters kind of person.
I could probably win a prize for attempting to set up blogs on the most hosting services. I am still in love with the old version of iLife, which required no brain cells from me to operate. But here I am again, back here instead of there, because I'm not even sure there still exists. And I kind of get this.
My thoughts today:
* I have no voice. Again. For 4 days, I had a scratchy throat. Then at 2:00 p.m. yesterday, my voice began to ebb away. To a place it will probably stay for the next two weeks. I don't really feel bad; I just feel angry about it. How dare it desert me when I have things to do!
* We are skipping school today. I had Older Kid writing this morning, but with no voice and a very disruptive contingent from my own family, it was hard. I want my kids to do things exactly the way I want them, with a minimum of whining. I want them to take the assignments as seriously as I do in my own head (yeah, I'm not actually writing them myself. But I would!). It's a pretty spring day, and I'm all for enjoying outside. But the real reason we are not doing school today is that we have a number of extra people over today for various reasons--family emergencies, errands to run.
* And here's the shocker. I started writing this particular post, in all caps (not sure why--can't get it to stop!), back in March. And it's going to be May in, oh, about 31 minutes. So clearly I cannot get my act together enough to accomplish much of anything.
* So I might as well write what's on my mind at this particular moment, and I will solemnly promise myself to press post and then set myself a goal of writing every single day for the month of may, kind of a nanoblomo personal event...or something like that.
* What's on my mind at the moment actually has something to do with the message at church this week, which is not really my style as a writing prompt. But there it is. The gist of the message is that it would be really nice if people who were in power--politicians, leaders of any kind, people we work for, etc.--had "moral authority"--defined in a non-partisan way. Moral authority means that your walk matches your talk...even if I don't agree with your talk. And the final thrust of the message was that if there is no duplicity, leaders, wherever they fall in specific beliefs, could work together to solve problems. My favorite line was: "I would much rather vote for people on the other side of the political equation if they had integrity and moral authority than someone who agreed with me who did not."
But because, as my family will gladly tell you, I'm a pretty selfish person and yes, it is all about me, I have been chewing on this particular message in a personal way. And I am bothered by the fact that I'm about as crooked, non-straightforward, and afraid to just be myself as any politician. I have a bad habit of trying to be what I think the people around me want me to be. And I also have a bad habit of being a severe shades of gray person, which means that most of the time I'm not sure where to even put myself, whether we're talking about a specific hot-button issue, whether we're talking about a generalized political party or persuasion, or whether I'm even talking about how I generally live my life. I'm a big believer in the idea that we are always making choices, the old "to choose not to choose is a choice," and that even if we think we are dodging pinning ourselves down much of the time, we're pinning. Oh, we're pinning away.
Personal topic #1on moral integrity: It bothers me when people make assumptions about where I stand on something. And it bothers me more when I am forced to acknowledge that I usually create that situation myself. The current manifestation: I have a child who will pretty much post the last thought in his head at any given moment right onto facebook. His filter is coarse. Well, actually he has no filter. So he posts a very right-leaning, rush limbaugh/glen beck kind of sentiment the other day. I make a snarky type comment, but my general rule is that I steer pretty far from politics when I post on facebook. So a family member replies in a direct address to me that I should maybe expose him to some more "progressive" viewpoints. facebook is not my media choice for family conversation, but the comment raises my hackles because...that is our everyday conversation at home. if my distracted, inattentive child does not listen to the discussions, if he has tuned them out because he does not understand them, have I neglected to beat him on the head with what I wish he would say? And then my next thought is to blame myself--well, I'm not a person who is constantly posting a clear alignment with a particular set of political or social beliefs in the public forum. Well, I don't strongly identify myself with a particular party or vocal special interest group. I tend to talk on and on at length about how I see situations as complex and how I think we need to be compassionate and nice and that being a follower of christ does not mean being "conservative" or republican to me...no wonder 13 year olds tune it out and start daydreaming about the ps3 or, well, pretty much anything else. And no wonder strong, even if stupid and mean, rhetoric can have some sway.
But I see myself as not very morally integrated or authoritative if you want to call it that. Because I am afraid. Afraid that if my liberal friends knew that I was not, maybe, as liberal as they are, that they would have no respect for me and not want to be with me any more. And that if my more conservative friends knew I was not conservative, at least not in the way that they view it, that I would be shunned there as well. Or lose my position. And I like the things I do. And I like the people I know. So I feel pretty disingenuous, and at the same time disinclined to just come all clean for everyone. Because for one, that would be weird and awkward out of the blue, and two, I still am conflict averse and my thoughts aren't entirely clear even to me, and I really don't enjoy stirring hornets' nests (though some would beg to differ), and I still adhere to the dictum that it's probably best to avoid politics and religion as topics of conversation and confession in mixed company. Nevertheless, I aspire to be more open and honest. And that's out of my comfort zone.
Personal topic #2: I do not want to draw any more attention to the article in the paper than it already has. It was a completely awkward process in so many ways. And I'll confess, it was most awkward because I was concerned I was going to piss off homeschoolers with it. The whole thing still leaves me feeling uneasy, and as I've been pondering the concept of moral authority/integrity, I'm realizing that once again, I'm trying to be everything to everyone (at least in my head). I'm so worried about raising the hackles or getting a snub from people who probably are not even deeply personally engaged with me and who I may not even know that I have trouble just being...myself.
first of all, I felt from the start that talking to a reporter is maybe like talking to the police--a dumb idea whether you are guilty or innocent. But once someone approached me at a conference, I was also in the dilemma of perhaps making a different impression if I did not respond or if I blew it off. Then I might be cast as the reclusive, secretive homeschooler who was anti-social, had something to hide, had some motive for not being open and clear. And I'm not ashamed. And I am legal. And I don't have anything to hide. Do I think everyone understands what I am doing and why I am doing it? Of course not. I don't really get everything everyone else does, either. But even talking at all or allowing someone to ask questions about what we do felt somehow risky to, if not me, then to someone, somewhere.
Second, I was anxious about the prospect of having something that we did portrayed as indicative of what homeschoolers do in general, and thus offending someone whose homeschool does not look as "schooly" as what was pictured. Or worse yet, that I would be damaging years of some homeschool advocates' (who I suppose I view as always being someone else) work. In the back of my head, I believe that there are people out there who have the "right" views or right words or safe things that can be said in public, and I should know what these are, but my intuition is screwy. What's kind of funny is that the article originally stemmed from questions about spelling bees--do we do them, why do homeschoolers do them (lots don't!), and if we aren't doing spelling bees, what kinds of things do we do. I'm again not very consistent. On the one hand, I can be ridiculously naive and trusting--and not in a good way. I usually think the best about people's motives and intentions and assume if they sound interested that they are, and that they are not plotting to stab me in the back or manipulate my words or whatever other malice is possible when it comes to, in this case, print. On the other, I can indulge paranoid fantasies in the middle of the night--they're going to talk about my dirty baseboards and the handprint smudges on my walls, or my first grader who was running around the yard like a maniac in the middle of a "school day" or my teens who currently do not want to identify themselves in the same sentence as the word "homeschool" and we would be painted in some nightmare image of parental and educational laziness and then mainstream folks would be fuming and fellow homeschoolers would be fuming because I talked to people who misinterpreted the entire ethos of what we do and we should not even be conversing with the world outside our culture of shared understanding.
But back to the moral authority walk-the-talk thing, I know I need to let some of this anxiety go. Of course being judicious and using common sense and protecting yourself is all good (and some of us are deficient in these areas, and my finger is pointing right at myself here). However, the pictures, the life I think I showed is the life that I think I live--even as I try to imagine the ways I could have shown everyone else's life so as not to 'misrepresent' anyone or draw negative attention. No events were fabricated. It was neither my "ideal" of what I wish homeschooling looked like for us nor a conscious attempt to show what some other people's life and education look like. We *DO* go to taekwondo and dance practices. We *DO* have friends over to do science experiments, and this is the second time in a month I have boiled red cabbage and pulled out my bottle of ammonia. And we *do* go to band every week and have concerts and run around in Mr. Robinson's driveway. And we did not begin homeschooling for religious reasons. And this was only what this particular Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday looked like, which is not necessarily what the next ones will be.
I'm not sure if the writer or the photographer "got it" because I'm not sure what it means to "get it." I don't even really know what "it" is, to be honest. I suppose what I do know is that I am compliant with Virginia law. and i know (except when I forget to check the calendar!) what we do with our days. And I know that I will always be second guessing how our days go, wondering if I should be doing more, less, different, like someone else, not like someone else. I don't want to be a spokesperson for anyone other than myself. And I don't know that anyone else ever really "gets" other people's lives, no matter what their lives are. It can still blow my mind, when I stop to think about it, that each of us lives a unique reality and has an entire history and experience and set of memories and the processing of those memories and experiences. When I do think about that, I feel it is a wonder that we are able to communicate and get along with other people as well as we do.
So my personal challenge to myself for this week is to continue to scrutinize and make a ruthless moral inventory or whatever you want to call it of the ways that I am not very genuine or consistent or morally authoritative--able to be relied upon so that what you see is what I really do and so that people can kind of know me and not some cobbled construct. This is not for others, it is for myself. It has been sobering to see how much fear governs how I let myself engage with other people, either through the personae I seek to create or the ways I try to appease and not rock a boat because I fear rejection. Who knows what awaits us if we really are genuinely ourselves.
I also don't like to be in a box. I was investigating BlogHer because, well, it's kind of a brand name, and I was confused and it raised my hackles a little. I'm not sure that I can say for sure I am "engaging community," and I even cringe a little at the thought of that. What if I go on, say, an unengaging binge? What if I find myself totally engaging, but the rest of the world finds me not so much so? Or the powers that be that accept my application to be part of the community don't find me communal enough. What if my material does not primarily appeal to women? I am not quite a rule-follower, and I get twitchy when things get sort of institutionalized. I would freak out if I felt I had to concoct contests or have giveaways of any kind. I don't really want to develop a brand or style identity. I like being inconsistent. I'm not a snappy subtitle with too many periods and no capital letters kind of person.
I could probably win a prize for attempting to set up blogs on the most hosting services. I am still in love with the old version of iLife, which required no brain cells from me to operate. But here I am again, back here instead of there, because I'm not even sure there still exists. And I kind of get this.
My thoughts today:
* I have no voice. Again. For 4 days, I had a scratchy throat. Then at 2:00 p.m. yesterday, my voice began to ebb away. To a place it will probably stay for the next two weeks. I don't really feel bad; I just feel angry about it. How dare it desert me when I have things to do!
* We are skipping school today. I had Older Kid writing this morning, but with no voice and a very disruptive contingent from my own family, it was hard. I want my kids to do things exactly the way I want them, with a minimum of whining. I want them to take the assignments as seriously as I do in my own head (yeah, I'm not actually writing them myself. But I would!). It's a pretty spring day, and I'm all for enjoying outside. But the real reason we are not doing school today is that we have a number of extra people over today for various reasons--family emergencies, errands to run.
* And here's the shocker. I started writing this particular post, in all caps (not sure why--can't get it to stop!), back in March. And it's going to be May in, oh, about 31 minutes. So clearly I cannot get my act together enough to accomplish much of anything.
* So I might as well write what's on my mind at this particular moment, and I will solemnly promise myself to press post and then set myself a goal of writing every single day for the month of may, kind of a nanoblomo personal event...or something like that.
* What's on my mind at the moment actually has something to do with the message at church this week, which is not really my style as a writing prompt. But there it is. The gist of the message is that it would be really nice if people who were in power--politicians, leaders of any kind, people we work for, etc.--had "moral authority"--defined in a non-partisan way. Moral authority means that your walk matches your talk...even if I don't agree with your talk. And the final thrust of the message was that if there is no duplicity, leaders, wherever they fall in specific beliefs, could work together to solve problems. My favorite line was: "I would much rather vote for people on the other side of the political equation if they had integrity and moral authority than someone who agreed with me who did not."
But because, as my family will gladly tell you, I'm a pretty selfish person and yes, it is all about me, I have been chewing on this particular message in a personal way. And I am bothered by the fact that I'm about as crooked, non-straightforward, and afraid to just be myself as any politician. I have a bad habit of trying to be what I think the people around me want me to be. And I also have a bad habit of being a severe shades of gray person, which means that most of the time I'm not sure where to even put myself, whether we're talking about a specific hot-button issue, whether we're talking about a generalized political party or persuasion, or whether I'm even talking about how I generally live my life. I'm a big believer in the idea that we are always making choices, the old "to choose not to choose is a choice," and that even if we think we are dodging pinning ourselves down much of the time, we're pinning. Oh, we're pinning away.
Personal topic #1on moral integrity: It bothers me when people make assumptions about where I stand on something. And it bothers me more when I am forced to acknowledge that I usually create that situation myself. The current manifestation: I have a child who will pretty much post the last thought in his head at any given moment right onto facebook. His filter is coarse. Well, actually he has no filter. So he posts a very right-leaning, rush limbaugh/glen beck kind of sentiment the other day. I make a snarky type comment, but my general rule is that I steer pretty far from politics when I post on facebook. So a family member replies in a direct address to me that I should maybe expose him to some more "progressive" viewpoints. facebook is not my media choice for family conversation, but the comment raises my hackles because...that is our everyday conversation at home. if my distracted, inattentive child does not listen to the discussions, if he has tuned them out because he does not understand them, have I neglected to beat him on the head with what I wish he would say? And then my next thought is to blame myself--well, I'm not a person who is constantly posting a clear alignment with a particular set of political or social beliefs in the public forum. Well, I don't strongly identify myself with a particular party or vocal special interest group. I tend to talk on and on at length about how I see situations as complex and how I think we need to be compassionate and nice and that being a follower of christ does not mean being "conservative" or republican to me...no wonder 13 year olds tune it out and start daydreaming about the ps3 or, well, pretty much anything else. And no wonder strong, even if stupid and mean, rhetoric can have some sway.
But I see myself as not very morally integrated or authoritative if you want to call it that. Because I am afraid. Afraid that if my liberal friends knew that I was not, maybe, as liberal as they are, that they would have no respect for me and not want to be with me any more. And that if my more conservative friends knew I was not conservative, at least not in the way that they view it, that I would be shunned there as well. Or lose my position. And I like the things I do. And I like the people I know. So I feel pretty disingenuous, and at the same time disinclined to just come all clean for everyone. Because for one, that would be weird and awkward out of the blue, and two, I still am conflict averse and my thoughts aren't entirely clear even to me, and I really don't enjoy stirring hornets' nests (though some would beg to differ), and I still adhere to the dictum that it's probably best to avoid politics and religion as topics of conversation and confession in mixed company. Nevertheless, I aspire to be more open and honest. And that's out of my comfort zone.
Personal topic #2: I do not want to draw any more attention to the article in the paper than it already has. It was a completely awkward process in so many ways. And I'll confess, it was most awkward because I was concerned I was going to piss off homeschoolers with it. The whole thing still leaves me feeling uneasy, and as I've been pondering the concept of moral authority/integrity, I'm realizing that once again, I'm trying to be everything to everyone (at least in my head). I'm so worried about raising the hackles or getting a snub from people who probably are not even deeply personally engaged with me and who I may not even know that I have trouble just being...myself.
first of all, I felt from the start that talking to a reporter is maybe like talking to the police--a dumb idea whether you are guilty or innocent. But once someone approached me at a conference, I was also in the dilemma of perhaps making a different impression if I did not respond or if I blew it off. Then I might be cast as the reclusive, secretive homeschooler who was anti-social, had something to hide, had some motive for not being open and clear. And I'm not ashamed. And I am legal. And I don't have anything to hide. Do I think everyone understands what I am doing and why I am doing it? Of course not. I don't really get everything everyone else does, either. But even talking at all or allowing someone to ask questions about what we do felt somehow risky to, if not me, then to someone, somewhere.
Second, I was anxious about the prospect of having something that we did portrayed as indicative of what homeschoolers do in general, and thus offending someone whose homeschool does not look as "schooly" as what was pictured. Or worse yet, that I would be damaging years of some homeschool advocates' (who I suppose I view as always being someone else) work. In the back of my head, I believe that there are people out there who have the "right" views or right words or safe things that can be said in public, and I should know what these are, but my intuition is screwy. What's kind of funny is that the article originally stemmed from questions about spelling bees--do we do them, why do homeschoolers do them (lots don't!), and if we aren't doing spelling bees, what kinds of things do we do. I'm again not very consistent. On the one hand, I can be ridiculously naive and trusting--and not in a good way. I usually think the best about people's motives and intentions and assume if they sound interested that they are, and that they are not plotting to stab me in the back or manipulate my words or whatever other malice is possible when it comes to, in this case, print. On the other, I can indulge paranoid fantasies in the middle of the night--they're going to talk about my dirty baseboards and the handprint smudges on my walls, or my first grader who was running around the yard like a maniac in the middle of a "school day" or my teens who currently do not want to identify themselves in the same sentence as the word "homeschool" and we would be painted in some nightmare image of parental and educational laziness and then mainstream folks would be fuming and fellow homeschoolers would be fuming because I talked to people who misinterpreted the entire ethos of what we do and we should not even be conversing with the world outside our culture of shared understanding.
But back to the moral authority walk-the-talk thing, I know I need to let some of this anxiety go. Of course being judicious and using common sense and protecting yourself is all good (and some of us are deficient in these areas, and my finger is pointing right at myself here). However, the pictures, the life I think I showed is the life that I think I live--even as I try to imagine the ways I could have shown everyone else's life so as not to 'misrepresent' anyone or draw negative attention. No events were fabricated. It was neither my "ideal" of what I wish homeschooling looked like for us nor a conscious attempt to show what some other people's life and education look like. We *DO* go to taekwondo and dance practices. We *DO* have friends over to do science experiments, and this is the second time in a month I have boiled red cabbage and pulled out my bottle of ammonia. And we *do* go to band every week and have concerts and run around in Mr. Robinson's driveway. And we did not begin homeschooling for religious reasons. And this was only what this particular Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday looked like, which is not necessarily what the next ones will be.
I'm not sure if the writer or the photographer "got it" because I'm not sure what it means to "get it." I don't even really know what "it" is, to be honest. I suppose what I do know is that I am compliant with Virginia law. and i know (except when I forget to check the calendar!) what we do with our days. And I know that I will always be second guessing how our days go, wondering if I should be doing more, less, different, like someone else, not like someone else. I don't want to be a spokesperson for anyone other than myself. And I don't know that anyone else ever really "gets" other people's lives, no matter what their lives are. It can still blow my mind, when I stop to think about it, that each of us lives a unique reality and has an entire history and experience and set of memories and the processing of those memories and experiences. When I do think about that, I feel it is a wonder that we are able to communicate and get along with other people as well as we do.
So my personal challenge to myself for this week is to continue to scrutinize and make a ruthless moral inventory or whatever you want to call it of the ways that I am not very genuine or consistent or morally authoritative--able to be relied upon so that what you see is what I really do and so that people can kind of know me and not some cobbled construct. This is not for others, it is for myself. It has been sobering to see how much fear governs how I let myself engage with other people, either through the personae I seek to create or the ways I try to appease and not rock a boat because I fear rejection. Who knows what awaits us if we really are genuinely ourselves.
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